Victorian salmon flies are tied according to recipes that are up to 150 years old and call for some of the rarest feathers in the world. This is the story of what may be the greatest feather robbery of all time, a million dollars in rare birds, stolen from a British museum.
Duly downloaded. Thank you.
Several weeks ago, I met a British flytyer I have “sort of” known for forty years, since we met on a trout water in the late 1970s as keen young fishers, and tyers too, we discovered, who had already being tying flies for a decade, having both started in late boyhood. He went the way of tying Traditionals, I heard, twenty years back, having lost contact with him , in the 1980s, whilst I continued tying far less rarified, bottom-line fishable, trout, grayling, salmon and sea-trout fair.
I’d like to blab, fellas, as what I heard from that man (no longer a tyer or a fisher himself) back in June, told to me in complete confidence, damned several more names than those that featured in Kirk’s excellent book. Kirk got close, too close for a few, who are doubtless now “very shy boy”s, as Hannibal Lecter called the New Psycho on the Block in Silence of The Lambs.
We can only hope that those, well, frankly weird and very strange non-fisher “Traddies” have now either cleaned up their acts or left their Neanderthal Man Caves and tried actual real fishing in their old age!
Not one of Fly Fishing’s best moments.
A pain in the a’ pedant’s edit:
“…..salmon and sea-trout FARE.”